Category: books etc

In the first, Maryanne Wolf (Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA) talks about how our brains’ ability to read is changing as we read on electronic devices more:

My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.

She goes on to talk about we have less “patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts” and along with that potentially comes less ability to apply higher levels of critical analysis to such texts (or perhaps also in texts we come across in every day life like contracts or wills).

The whole article is worth reading (especially how the change in reading is coming with a change in empathy) but the main thing that interested me was how reading on physically printed media instead of a digital device kind of added “a spatial ‘thereness’ for text” and readers have a better sense of where they are in what they are reading – a place “to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text.”

The second tab I’ve had open – the one from Austin Kleon’s blog about reading with a pencil made me really think about how I read. I don’t think I could ever actually write IN a book, which is also interesting to me – there are people who freely write in books they own and then there are people who would never dream of it and is there anyone in between?

Marginalia means to me that I’ve paid attention to the thing that I was reading – for the essays and such that I’ve written in the past, I’ve always had to print out papers (in part to highlight them and make notes) rather than attempt to read them in a digital format. Even though I can’t bring myself to write notes in a book, the books I used for my dissertation were RIDDLED with post-it notes with various scribbles and arrows on them.

I feel like I don’t read as much as I used to – I certainly don’t get through as many books as I once did. However, when I really think about it, I wonder if I am really reading less or is it that reading in a digital format somehow counts less? Instead of zipping through novels, I read fanfic, journal articles, meta, Twitter, newsletters (the satisfaction of reading a blog with the ease of it being right there in my inbox, though I never forsook RSS), the odd Livejournal/Dreamwidth entry… so am I really reading less? Or is it that I don’t have the patience for long things anymore? I know I don’t understand how anyone can binge-watch a series – I can watch two episodes tops before I have to switch to a different series.

Anyway. It is a thing I have been thinking about.

Other stuff:

Tackling the Ethical Challenges of Slippery Technology – I studied software engineering and the closest we really got to thinking about ethics was the single first-year module “Philosophy of Computer Science” (or something similar). I ended up writing about whether an AI could have a soul. More recently, I was talking about AI with a priest and he couldn’t believe that we don’t necessarily know why an AI might make a particular decision – if we made them, then we must understand them right?

I was thinking about this quote I had rattling around in my head and knew that the original piece was said by a man to a woman but I couldn’t quite remember if it was in text or on film, in real life or in fiction but that I had heard/read it twice. In the end my google-fu turned up the film Bright Star which covers the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

So.

That quote:

“The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”

Keats says this to Brawne after she turns up for her first lesson in poetry and he starts to wonder if he’s really up to that kind of task or if it can really be taught.

Anyway, having finished The City & The City, that line got me thinking about something Mieville said in the past about monsters.

“So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There’s no contradiction.”

AND THEN, also about something that I occasionally hear from my favourite DJ on my favourite radio station, what seems like one or two people on tumblr and a handful of my music-loving friends on twitter…which is usually some variation on “Participate, not document” in regard to going to gigs and the sea of fellow attendees with cameraphones held aloft videoing the proceedings (I’m a phone Luddite, so generally I may take an actual camera with me but I still treat my digital camera like it’s a disposable film camera and if I do take pictures, I tend to end up with about 5 or 6 choice moments that may or may not be a little blurry).

(And no, I don’t entirely know what my point with that tangent was.)

The sort of general theme of wallowing in the experience probably applies to most of my take on existence. Which, I suppose, makes sense. I wallow in it. I don’t think too much about what the lyrics to a song might mean, but I enjoy the feel of them in my mouth.

And that’s the kind of approach I had with this book. I realise that, yes, there must be undertones of various messages threaded throughout…but for me that’s not the point. When I’m there, inhabiting the brainspace of the main character Borlu, I’m there. In Beszel or Ul Qoma. Unseeing and seeing. Weirdly (or not) I hear Borlu’s dialogue in Mieville’s voice. Another thing that occurred to me was that I regard both cities as somewhere much like Istanbul, but not. More almost but not quite, which I guess may be the point since any place mentioned in a detective story automatically becomes the alternate reality of whatever real place it might have been set in.

I liked it though. At one point I thought that Yolanda and Mahalia were the same person. I wondered if fic had been written of Corwi and Dhatt working together. I was highly suspicious of that one character who asked those very insistent, pointed questions. Other things.

I love books that deal with religions. Especially made up ones. I love books that deal with the whole world within a world/city within a city/otherside/invisible reality trope.

This kind of SMOOSHES them together. Which is ideal really.

I did read a few reviews where Mieville is accused of sticking in too many made up words and that making it harder to understand. I didn’t get that at all. If you need a word or term for something and there isn’t one, then make it up. At lease he draws on existing language to actually make the new terms make sense.

Although that might just be me, as I learnt a good deal of the vocabulary I possess by figuring out what words meant in context. It’s a pain in the next when I actually have to explain something to my mum, but it does come in handy with crosswords.

I liked the theme of reconciliation being a journey in this books and the discussion of the various methods that can be used to make this journey. Lederach has very easy to read, almost conversational style – which definitely helped. So often I’ve found that the texts I have to read for my course are an awful slog. This is far from that.
Peppered throughout are stories – from Lederach’s personal experience, from the Bible or ones that have been told to him. This offered a nice break from the more “thinky” parts of the book and offered their own points to consider in a different way.

I’ll admit that I am terribly biased when it comes to Stewart Lee because I loved him when I was a teenager and he was skinny and not old. Luckily for me, Lee is still incredibly funny (and admittedly, still adorably cute – though that’s possibly not an adjective normally attributed to him).
This book is basically a transcript of his “If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one” show but with DVD extras (aka, the best footnotes of any author ever). It’s probably not the thing if you’re not familiar with Lee’s style or his delivery – you won’t hear his voice when you’re reading and I think that’s important because. Well. It’s a transcript isn’t it? The awkward pauses and repetition and failboatiness of his style is an integral part of what makes Stewart Lee funny and without prior knowledge of this…well, maybe get a DVD rather than a book.

“The other thing about this Wednesday is that it appears to have quite a serious hangover.

Alcohol…

Always seems like such a good idea at the time. The problem, of course, is that the brain that thinks it’s a good idea is one suffering from increasingly impaired judgment. You start the evening as a sophisticated gentleman, judiciously sipping a jaunty beer as you discuss the dominant cultural forces in seventeenth century Flanders, and next thing you know you’re dressed up like a nun and running around the town baying at the moon. Unless you started the evening as a nun, I guess, in which case maybe you wind up dressed as a writer. I don’t know. I’ll have to find a nun and ask her. Seems like a high mountain to climb right now, though.

On the upside, I got my week’s exercise done by standing up for the whole evening. So on balance I think I can feel pretty virtuous about the whole thing.”